Imagine a friend you trust, literally, with your life. One who has kept you and all your family safe and well. Then, one day, you notice that friend is growing terribly sick. I am, of course, referring to the NHS.

Does the above analogy feel like an exaggeration? Read the facts and judge for yourself.

First off, funding. According to Parliament’s spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, the NHS in England lacks a convincing plan to plug a £22bn ‘black hole’ in funding within five years. They describe a significant number of acute hospital trusts as in ‘serious and persistent financial distress’, and warn there is a ‘spiralling’ trend of increased deficits and the current payment system is ‘not fit for purpose’.

NHS England has told a key parliamentary committee of MPs that spending on temporary staff was the largest driver behind trusts’ increasing deficits. It claimed that “some agencies providing temporary staff had taken advantage of the situation to charge ‘rip-off’ fees”.

In other words, we as taxpayers are being taken for a ride by employment agencies when the solution is mind-numbingly simple. Namely, you hire, retain and train the staff you need. Any business worth its salt understands the essential asset for any enterprise, large or small, is its people. Yet the Government has cravenly abolished the bursaries for nurses that attracted many talented people to the profession.

According to Health Education England, the NHS’s staffing agency, our NHS lacks 42,000 nurses, midwives, physiotherapists and occupational therapists. In addition, there are 1,674 fewer district nurses and 842 fewer learning disability nurses than in 2012.

GP numbers have fallen by one per cent over the last five years despite a media-trumpeted Government pledge to increase the total by 5,000 between 2015 and 2020. To add salt to the wounds, almost one in three paramedic jobs are vacant across England. Finally, the number of nurses leaving the profession rose from 7.1 per cent in 2011-12 to 8.7 per cent last year.

A big factor in the disastrous recruitment and retention of NHS staff is the government’s decision to transfer desperately needed public funds to tax breaks for the very privileged. This has led to a pay freeze lasting a decade. Even the recent offer of a ‘pay rise’ of six per cent over three years is in fact a pay cut of three per cent when you take into account inflation.

Staff shortages lead to cancelled operations, longer waiting lists, operating theatres standing idle. Meanwhile there are not enough beds in our hospitals to keep the system flowing. All are symptoms of failure we must ignore no longer, especially considering the parallel crises affecting mental health services and the social care system.

To make matters worse, the Royal College of GPs has warned that family doctors are ‘regularly working way beyond what could be considered safe for patients’, potentially jeopardising their own health and wellbeing. Yet waiting times to see your GP have never been longer.

Why cannot the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, manage such basic issues of competence? That is a question he and the government who are giving him free rein must answer.

Many citizens in the UK increasingly believe private companies driven by the profit motive are circling round the NHS hoping to feed off our basic human need for health care. In short, the same trick they pulled off with privatised rail, water and energy.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise. Mr Hunt himself co-authored a pamphlet calling for the ‘Americanisation’ of the NHS in 2005 (although we should note he currently denies that is his project today).

Whether our dear friend, the NHS, the institution we have trusted for so long survives is entirely up to ordinary people. We know what the elite prefer: more privatisation, outsourcing and the continuation of the tax-payer funded bonanza known as PFI. Affording private health care isn’t a problem for such people or their families.

When the 1945 Labour Government founded the NHS it was for everyone, rich or poor. In its hour of need, we dare not let our best friend down.